His door clicked closed a moment before hers was carefully opened. If he’d known Louisa, he might have smiled at the colorful cursing coming from the front porch, but he didn’t know Louisa, so he took himself upstairs, oblivious to the outrage he’d aroused.

He spread the paper on the scarred, butcher-block kitchen table and drained half a cup of industrial strength, scalding hot sludge from a twenty-five-cup coffee urn. He grunted at the movie review and shuffled off to his bedroom for a pack of cigarettes. When he got to the bedroom, he remembered he’d given up smoking.

He muttered a few satisfyingly crude phrases and scowled at his cat. Scowling at the cat was one of those gestures of habit that neither man nor feline took seriously. In truth, the cat was Pete’s best friend.

Louisa narrowed her eyes and glared at the door next to hers. It was him. The oaf had stolen her paper. She’d never met him. Didn’t know what he looked like. What she knew was that he came skulking in at all hours of the night, and that he played his music too loud. He leaked disgusting cooking smells into the heating system, left his laundry in the basement washer and dryer for days at a time, and more often than not parked his car in her parking space. She hated him with the sort of passion only forced cohabitation could produce. The man was scum.

She should bang on his door and demand her paper back, she thought. But what if he wouldn’t give it to her? What then? She could hardly duke it out with him. He was probably large and hairy. And she couldn’t prove that he had her paper, could she? It wasn’t as if there were witnesses.

All right, so she could do without a paper for one crummy morning. After all, she was late and probably didn’t have time to read the paper, anyway. Right? Wrong. She’d allocated herself five minutes. Five lousy minutes, and the creep upstairs was reading her paper on her time. What was worse, he was getting away with it because deep down inside she was a wimp. She was afraid of the big, hairy slob who lived on the second floor.